The mud in the shoe: a starting point to think about women, the neighborhood and floods

Abstract

The purpose of the following article is to analyze the relationship that women build with a neighborhood such as La Vuelta del Paraguayo (LVDP) in the city of Santa Fe, Argentina. LVDP is a riverside neighborhood that is located in the alluvial valley of the Paraná River and has the peculiarity that it cyclically suffers flooding. The problem falls within the field of study of space and gender and starts from understanding that places are not neutral, that relations of inequality are reproduced, and that “gender” not only interacts with age, class, and sexuality structures, but also it
also implies the relationship with nature. To address this objective, we conducted ethnographic interviews (Spradley, 1979) with key informants to find out what their perceptions are about what it means to live in a neighborhood
with these characteristics. It should be clarified that when we talk about women in the research we are referring to cis women who live/reside in LVDP. Among the main findings, we observe that the unequal conditions in which LVDP women are immersed varies according to the cycles of the river, that is, if it is low or if there is flooding.